Friday, October 10, 2014

Window on Eurasia: ‘Russia Doesn’t Have a Majority in the CIS on Ukraine,’ Baranov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 10 – While the Commonwealth
of Independent States has never been a democratic union of equals, it is
nonetheless true that “the CIS is not just Russia,” as Ukrainian
parliamentarians point out, and that Russia’s loss of control of this group on
an issue so important to it may hasten the demise of the 22-year-old union.

That is the judgment of Anatoly
Baranov, the editor-in-chief of the FORUM.msk portal, in reaction to the
apparent decision of Ukraine to remain within the CIS at least for the time
beingand use the support it has there
from Belarus and Kazakhstan to form its own anti-Moscow majority (forum-msk.org/material/news/10533367.html).

If that happens, he continues, then
Moscow might be forced “to leave the CIS or come to terms with the fact that it
isn’t the main thing there.”Ukraine,
the Russian analyst continues, is “beautifully using” a situation in which it
isn’t going to be expelled but might leave “only voluntarily.”

At present, Baranov says, Kyiv “intends
to remain a member of the CIS, to use all existing preferences there, and at the
same time to develop relations with the European Union and even NATO.” And that
in turn, he suggests, could even allow Ukraine to drive Russia out of the
post-Soviet space.

In that event, he continues, Moscow
will have to “establish a new post-USSR space” consisting of itself and the “unrecognized
republics of Karabakh, South Osetia and Abkhazia, Transdniestria and now the
Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Luhansk Peoples Republic,” to which might be
added “the Pamir Peoples Republic, Transcarpathia, the territory of the Lesser
Zhuz in Kazakhstan and so on.”

This CIS in turn would be
transformed into “an anti-Russian union,” furious “at the former metropolitan
center. And that would leave Moscow with only the option to “support
all-possible separatist tendencies in Europe – Catalonia and the Basques,
Tuscany and Venice, Brittany, and Provence, Scotland and Ulster along with
Wales, Bavaria and the former GDR.”

Not forgetting, of course, Baranov
concludes, America, where a Moscow that found itself in such a position could
play on Texas and Quebec as well as “Alaska, California and Hawaii, which as is
well-known are Russian lands from time immemorial, parts of Vladimir Putin’s “Russian
world.”

Baranov’s scenario is certainly over
the top, but it does call attention to what others are pointing to as well (see
Vitaly Portnikov at grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.233837.html):
the CIS and the related institutions Moscow has created to try to keep the
post-Soviet space together and even promote its re-integration are in trouble
and may soon be changed.